djoslin

A fresh new website
23 Sep 2016

I needed a distraction from my regular programming for a weekend, so I started recreating my website from scratch.
This time I didn't want to cut any corners, and wanted to get a taste of what modern webdev is like. I stopped
learning anything about webdev around the early 2000's, and thus, my methods were wildly out of date. I was
sticking to tried and true methods such as nested tables, and had very little experience in CSS.

While I doubt I have followed best practices, this page is a big improvement. I wanted to stop using PHP as a
crutch and make the entire website static, and therefore developed a static site generator using C#. I made sure
the website was 'responsive' as well, aka it resizes properly when the window gets as thin as a phone.

Added local splitscreen
15 Feb 2015

Now you can grab a gamepad and play against one of your friends on the same screen. It was something I've always
wanted to add to Vektor Prix, but the amount of time it would take to adapt the engine properly wasn't worth it.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could just run two instances of the game, resize them,
and connect to eachother through multiplayer automatically.

So I went that route, all that was left to do was polish the transitions and fix the random bugs that pop up from
doing something so nonstandard. The only issue left is that Fraps is unable to capture both screens on Windows 8,
which means I had to use other tools and deal with a big reduction in recorded video quality. But I'm happy to
report that the feature works!

Note: I had no one around to play as player 2 when I recorded these videos just now.

As for other changes: I've fixed the menu transitions so they run at a constant speed, the heads up display resizes
itself properly for skinny windows, I've slowed down the tutorial bots, fixed resolution options, and fixed a bunch
of misc multiplayer bugs.

Two weeks in one
23 Jan 2015

This past couple of weeks I've been doing some required final touches.

The first thing I did was zoom the camera out a bit so it is easier to see your surroundings. The camera's zoom
amount is adjustable in the options: zooming in will give you better performance, but zooming out will let you see
a lot more.

I feel like the new camera capabilities will make the game a bit easier to play. I also noticed that people had a
tough time knowing which vehicle was theirs when the race started, so now all of the enemies fade in at the
starting line. This makes self-identification extremely easy.

I've finished implementing the final level's unlockables, and therefore the game is beatable and 'complete'. I
still have more polish and bugfixes to attend to, but it's a great feeling getting the game to this stage.

The past few weeks I've made a ton of smaller changes as well, such as making the bots more intelligent in close
quarters combat, I made the vehicle speed adjustable for custom games, a yolo round where only bots are alive is
now skippable (both online and offline), I fixed the force that explosions give vehicles, and adjusted a bunch of
particle effects.